>>So, if there's a song construction tip that you can think of, I'd love to hear it.<<

I know what you mean. I've spent a lot of time lately trying to help the other half with her cubase & logic songwriting, & somehow having the whole thing laid out in front of you in a linear fashion seems somehow helpful.

what I used to do, at the height of my alesis programming powers about 15 years back, was write patterns into my hr16 & mmt8 which were odd numbers of steps long.

thus, if the bulk of the song was in 8's or 16's, I'd put in a 3-beat pattern for a breakdown or something. come to think of it, I used to write songs on a tb303 like this too. I used to cover sheets & sheets of paper with notes about which pattern was doing what, trying to keep the two or three boxes synchronised. sometimes I'd be doing this with a code-track off of my cassette portastudio, which didn't have song-pointers......

listening to that stuff back now, I had a tendency towards some really complex arrangements..

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